Embedly Now Goes Beyond Embedding With New Products “Extract” & “Display” For Making Sense Of Links & Resizing Images

Embedly, the Y Combinator-backed content embedding service used by Yammer, bit.ly, 37Signals, Storify, Reddit, Kickstarter, SoundCloud, and others, is today extending its platform to include two new products called “Display” and “Extract,” now available to anyone after months of beta testing. In addition to “Embed,” the company’s core technology for embedding videos, photos and other rich media into websites and apps, the three products are helping to transform Embedly from being just an embedding platform into a full toolkit for developers.

Founded in 2010, Boston-based Embedly participated in Y Combinator that year, and soon after raised seed funding from Betaworks, Ron Conway, and Chris Sacca. It later raised a larger round from Howard Lindzon, Social Leverage, Venture 51, Adam Schwartz, and others in summer 2011.

A freemium service, the platform is aimed at developers who need to convert the links shared across their sites into inline embedded media like videos, photos, charts, documents, and more, all on the fly. Today, this embedding service will now also work over SSL, in order to support the growing number of sites that are moving to increase security by using SSL technology.

Even more notably, Embedly is launching two new products, one of which is called “Display.” As co-founder Sean Creeley explains, Display is focused on transforming images across a site or service. It helps developers by resizing images on the fly, cropping them, making images uniform, and more. This is particularly helpful on mobile, where developers want to ensure that large images don’t eat up bandwidth on users’ smartphones, for example.

The other new product, known as “Extract,” is focused more on understanding the relevant information contained in an article. Extract can do what services like Readability do on its own backend – that is, pull out just the article text while stripping away other content on the site. But Extract can also help developers understand which articles are related to each other, for link-building purposes, and it can pull out the important entities from an article, like the “who,” “what,” “when,” and “where.”

Creeley says that developers are using this for things like web bookmarking services, commenting services, building Flipboard-like interfaces for streams, for mobile apps, and more.

Developers can now pick and choose from among the three services Embedly offers on its platform, and access the ones they want via APIs. All of Embedly’s tools are freemium offerings. For Embed and Extract, anything under 5,000 URLs per month is free. The company has 45,000 WordPress plugin downloads, for instance, and most of those tend to be free users. Meanwhile, for Display, developers will get 25,000 images per month for free.

Embedly today serves up half a billion API requests per month and has 15,000 registered developers across its services. Though Creeley declined to provide details as the split between free and paid users, he says that users convert to paid as they do across other “normal freemium services.”

Starting today, anyone can sign up for the new Embedly features, Extract, Display or the now SSL-ready Embed, from the company homepage here.